Samuel Richardson Clarissa, like the Lettres persanes, addresses
a question central to the Enlightenment: the relation of private
passions and public order. But while Montesquieu writes from
within the specific cultural field of French absolutism, Clarissa's
very different context is mid-
eighteenth-century British society.
Although the two texts adopt the same literary form, critics have
paid more attention to their differences than to their similarities.
Indeed, they have come to typify a distinction, which I argue is
in important ways illusory, between the sentimental letter-novel
and the philosophical epistolary narrative or cultural critique in
letter form.

The issues of public and private, gender and authority that
organize Montesquieu's text are crucial to Richardson's as well;
however, Richardson's responses to these issues are significantly
different from Montesquieu's. While Clarissa resembles the Lettres
persanes in redefining literary authority by emphasizing the importance of a reading public constituted as such by these very works, Richardson's novel ultimately modifies Montesquieu's idea of the
Republic of Letters, proposing a more limited enfranchisement of
its citizen-critics and a less radical form of the author/reader relation. This modification is motivated, I propose, by Richardson's
anxiety about the gender of the citizen-critic.

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